Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay is a history of dyes, pigments, and paints. Finlay traveled all over the globe to write this book. The chapter on ochre has her in Australia, talking to aboriginal painters. The section on green talks about how the bright green paints of the nineteenth century had arsenic. Yellow shades ( Read more... )

I finished A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson a few days ago. It was published in 2003, so some of the science is out of date, but it was still a fun read. Bryson started out at the Big Bang and the beginnings of the universe, and traced his way to the origins of human life. Along the way he talked about the formation of stars ( Read more... )

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey is fantastic. And hysterical. Yes, a book on diagramming sentences can be funny. I highly recommend it.

Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Throughout the Ages by Leland Gregory was amusing, but for ( Read more... )

I haven't been writing up the books I've read recently. So here we go.

50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior by Scott O. Lilienfeld (2009) -- I loved this, and I learned a lot. There was some stuff I already knew, but some of the myths were very surprising. Like, did you know that ( Read more... )

Franklin is a cartoonist, blogger, and knitter. He is also hilarious. He just posted a short send-up of Project Runway that's completely awesome. I love him.

Last night I picked up 59 Seconds, the new Richard Wiseman book. It's one of the ones I got from Amazon. Wow is it good. It's basically ways to help yourself that are scientifically proven through multiple experiments, without any of the bullshit that the average "self-help" books contain. In fact, a good number of the studies done refute ( Read more... )

Just finished Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Discourses on Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, and Other Dubious Subjects by Gardner. I need to read more of his stuff! He's 95 now. His most recent book came out in October. I need to see if the library has it. He's written a ton of books -- collections of his columns, math puzzles, ( Read more... )

kadymae recommended this book to me. The full title is The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, and it's by Steven Johnson. It's about the discovery of the nature of cholera transmission, how it affected modern city planning and sewage systems. It was a very engaging read ( Read more... )

I love odd histories. Simon Winchester writes excellent odd histories. Krakatoa and The Professor and the Madman were great. Last night I finished his biography of Joseph Needham -- The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. I had never heard of Needham before I read ( Read more... )

Today's book: What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England by Daniel Pool. I loved it. Having read a fair number of Victorian novels and Regency romances over the years, it was cool to see some of the details about the lives of the 19th-century English. I now know ( Read more... )